NO QUICK FIX: THE MANY PITFALLS OF A DEGREE-IN-THREE
Strategic Insights Blog | November 30, 2021
A recent Inside Higher Ed article, “A New Push to Create a 3-Year Degree Option” explores renewed institutional interest in restructuring undergraduate degree requirements, and it prompted us to think comprehensively about the nature of such accelerated programming for traditional undergraduates. Decades of market research studying the appeals and pressures for first-time, first-year college-going students convinces us that degree-earning structures for this group should be understood separately from programs serving returning adult learners, a diverse population for whom the implications and attraction of an accelerated degree path are known to be broadly different.
For context, any discussion of 3-year undergraduate degrees should be situated within our ongoing national debate around rising tuition costs and broad policy solutions targeting retention and degree completion, with the overall objectives of holding institutions to higher account on all fronts.
Current 4-year degree completion rates in the U.S. are appalling.
And make no mistake: current 4-year degree completion rates in the U.S. are appalling. Fundamentally, too few students who begin a degree actually finish it, and the percentage who finish in 4 years hangs at around 41% nationally (while 59% of students take 6 years to earn a bachelor’s degree). Such delays—unforeseen by a large majority of matriculating students—undoubtedly contribute to increased debt, burnout culture, and delayed entry to the workforce. And this issue of halting degree navigation may prove increasingly challenging over the next decade as demographic forecasts predict a decrease in demand and in the overall population of college-going students across the U.S. (Grawe, 2017).
However, any reconceptualized “Degree in 3” plan that aims to serve the myriad needs of traditional undergraduate students will have many structural obstacles to overcome.
It may well be that the concept of a 3-year degree is, at best, ambiguously desirable, and, at worst, unsupportable, given established and emergent trends in prospective student research.
When we consider the basic demands of accelerated degree programming, it becomes clear that students who are well-prepared for college, both academically and socially, are the ones positioned to thrive in a compressed completion environment. Students who have the advantages of Advanced Placement (AP) courses and Dual Enrollment (DE) preparation in high school, for example, will be better accommodated in fast-tracking through college curriculum.
Likewise, students who come from higher-income families often have the flexibility to pursue internships, to study abroad, to engage in athletics or co-curricular pursuits, to cultivate emotional resilience and well-being, and they tend to be more knowledgeable about informal networking and advancement opportunities (in other words, they have ‘higher social capital,’ and can navigate the ‘hidden curriculum’). Critically, financially stable students are less dependent on part-time and summer earning potential – and a key programming requirement for 3-year degrees is often that students take classes year-around to maintain enrollment momentum.
For our nation’s increasing numbers of racially and ethnically diverse students, many avenues to success through higher education are already difficult to navigate, both during college and post-graduation. To draw on just one data point: we know that need-based Pell Grant recipients are far less likely to graduate—from public or private institutions—than their wealthier peers. Growing shares of college-goers are lower-income and/or first-generation, and such matriculants are often less well prepared and experience more tendentious forms of support throughout their educational journey. If such students are not met with a tailored array of instructional and co-curricular support services, it is not unreasonable to infer that their completion rates for a 3-year degree could be much lower than for traditional bachelor degree programs going forward.
Can Imperatives to Increase Access in Higher Ed Deliver a Fully-Rounded Liberal Education?
Compressing course requirements in the interest of increasing pre-professional experience within a bachelor’s degree might, to take one example, fundamentally alter the nature and curricular standards of liberal arts training across disciplines. And this is a caution worth heeding, as majors in the liberal arts and sciences are often at the center of experimental, enrollment-boosting campus initiatives. Should we accept that the promise of less time spent in the pursuit of a degree will be worth the plausible tradeoffs? Or is a bolder solution to true college affordability and access possible? Rather than offering students a “light” version of a traditional undergraduate education, or defaulting to workforce preparation, we might ask whether the expenditure of academic resources—including the hiring and retention of faculty, staff, and teaching assistants, allocation of course credits, maintenance of facilities and co-curricular offerings, and so on—would actually change under the auspices of an accelerated degree path?
Institutions that offer a 3-year program, and charge less for it, will have lower tuition revenue and face increasing financial pressure if enrollment in 3-year programs does actually rise.
If one is to accept the claims of advocates for a 3-year degree, the latter will not compromise the essential academic and social experiences of a 4-year program. If that’s correct, then institutions that offer a 3-year program, and charge less for it, will have lower tuition revenue and face increasing financial pressure if enrollment in 3-year programs does actually rise.
Are Students Buying? Gauging 3-Year Market Interest
The most important metric for many institutions piloting a new abridged degree offering is, of course, student interest. As the IHE article points out, whether colleges and universities can get traction from a “degree in three” is an old question, and a vexed one: most highly-selective and elite institutions have rejected such propositions since the 1970s. Added to which, many 3-year programs have languished or been terminated in the past decade for lack of interest—one major turn-off is that few students actually receive the support they require and so fail to graduate in 3 years. A former A&S client was perplexed when their “guarantee” that students would graduate in 4-years utterly failed to register market appeal. The answer turned out to be that a high majority of their prospective students implicitly expected to graduate in 4 years (anyway). Data show that the same expectation continues to dominate nationally.
Given these factors, we would expect that prospective student interest in 3-year degrees would be low, but institutions considering implementing such an enterprise should conduct robust research with their individual markets before establishing such a program. A critical component of such research should be determining ROI, while bearing in mind the complex potential drawbacks for our emerging student populations.
Sources & Suggested Reading
Art & Science Group, “How price and affordability affect the enrollment decisions of prospective students” studentPOLL. Volume 12, Issue 2 (October 2016).
Jon Boeckenstedt. “Three Ways of Looking at Graduation Rates, 2020” Higher Ed Data Stories Blog. November 13, 2021.
Jacquelyn Elias. “These Were Last Fall’s Winners and Losers in Undergraduate Enrollment” The Chronicle of Higher Education. (October 8, 2021).
Nathan D. Grawe. Demographics and the Demand for Higher Education (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press), 2017.
Emma Whitford. “A New Push to Create a 3-Year Degree Option” Inside Higher Ed (November 9, 2021).
